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Cohabitation: The Art and Science of Living Together

When four sweaty women living in a 900 square foot apartment rush home after a two to three hour basketball practice, who gets to take the first shower in the home’s single bathroom?

It all depends on who yells “first shower!” before the others. Riverhawk women’s basketball players Leilani Morris, Christal Jeff, Kyndal Charleston and Rachel Sample, live together in the Lookingglass Apartments as roommates. Randomly during practice, one of the women will remember the shower and yell “first shower!” The other roommates then quickly yell “second” or “third” to avoid being last.

The ritual is one way the women have learned to deal with cohabitation, a growing American trend. Cohabitation is the practice of living together with non-family members. For some age groups, the cohabitation rate has more than doubled since the 1990s, according to Richard Fry and D’Vera Cohn of the Pew Research Center. Part of this is due to dropping median household incomes with a reported 46 million Americans now living in poverty, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The basketball women are not the only ones experiencing this social need. Jesse Proctor, a 33-year-old graphic design student, shares the fate of many Douglas County residents who have exchanged their dreams for the necessity of finding cheap housing.

Transferring soon?

“I can’t afford to live alone,” Proctor said. “I’ve had a roommate since 2002, and I anticipate that I will always have a roommate.”

Proctor, like most roommates, finds that cohabiting can have its downfalls. “Scheduling access to the bathroom and kitchen gets annoying. Also the fridge is like a battleground where roommates end up fighting for territory,” Proctor said. “At one place, that was the worst bathroom I’d ever seen.”

Proctor says he has also learned to be more forgiving and to make more compromises by living with others. “One of my roommates would always party late at night, like I’d be going to bed at 11 p.m. and they wouldn’t stop partying until 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. I’d have to get up out of bed and go to the living room and say ‘You don’t have to turn the music off, but at least turn the bass down because it’s rattling my walls.’ I was learning to compromise.”

Sheldon Cooper Says:

Sheldon: This is the temperature you agreed to in the roommate agreement.

Sheldon: According to the Roommate Agreement, Paragraph 9, Subsection B: The right to bathroom privacy is suspended in the event of force majeure, and believe me, I am experiencing a very majeure force!

Proctor dreams someday of having a larger bedroom, his own kitchen and his own bathroom.

The word “roommate” is sometimes associated with mooching and cleaning up other people’s messes in an effort to save money. However, the word is no longer synonymous with menace or eccentricity, in spite of the popularity of the world’s worst roommate, Sheldon Cooper on the television show The Big Bang Theory. For many roommates, like 19-year-old Leilani Morris, one of the four Riverhawk basketball players rooming together, cohabitation is about more than saving money.

“It has its positives and negatives, but what living arrangements don’t? It’s like a family; we fight and disagree with things at times, but we all get along,” Morris said. “By living with these girls it’s helped me learn things about myself that I wouldn’t have learned. Things like how mature I actually can be and how making certain decisions can affect my life.”

Cohabitation, according to the LIVESTRONG Foundation, brings benefits such as lifelong friendships, expanded social circles and less household work.

Proctor agrees that cohabitation is worthwhile. “Living alone is also boring. I don’t want to be lonely. Even though me and my roommates don’t spend a lot of time together it is still nice to know someone is there,” Proctor said. He and his roommates watch movies and tv shows together and have gaming sessions.

Morris and her basketball roommates say they spend most of their free time together in their apartment, eat all their meals together and share constant conversations. “There’s something new every day; I’m always laughing at someone, and there is never a dull moment. I chose this living situation because I enjoy living with others, and it’s cheaper,” Morris said. Morris says she and her roommates at times have laughed so hard that one roommate started drooling.

Proctor and his roommates enjoy pulling little pranks on each other. “The other day I left a fake fly on the Playstation 3 controller, and it freaked him out; later on, I found it on my computer mouse. We are wild,” Proctor said.

Both Morris and Proctor live in households which use rules and boundaries as well as living agreements to keep the peace.

“We go grocery shopping together but also buy some things separately. Those are the things we don’t want to share. If a person eats someone else’s personal food, it’s because it’s been there for so long it becomes fair game,” Morris said.

Proctor and his roommates also have a code. Although many of their rules relate to security, some are more casual. “We usually do the pick up after yourself rule. If you make a mess, you clean it up. Every once in a while an area gets too messy, and we will work together to clean it,” Proctor said.

As far as advice for others considering moving in with a roommate for the first time, Proctor and Morris independently share the same counsel: learn to be forgiving. Morris adds, “Living this way isn’t meant for all people so if you’re not a people person or can’t handle multiple personalities, then this isn’t the way you should go.”

“We go grocery shopping together but also buy some things separately. Those are the things we don’t want to share. If a person eats someone else’s personal food, it’s because it’s been there for so long it becomes fair game,” Morris said.

Proctor and his roommates also have a code. Although many of their rules relate to security, some are more casual. “We usually do the pick up after yourself rule. If you make a mess, you clean it up. Every once in a while an area gets too messy, and we will work together to clean it,” Proctor said.

As far as advice for others considering moving in with a roommate for the first time, Proctor and Morris independently share the same counsel: learn to be forgiving. Morris adds, “Living this way isn’t meant for all people so if you’re not a people person or can’t handle multiple personalities, then this isn’t the way you should go.”